Busy.
More often than not, my schedule seems downright busy. My husband is busy. Our youth group teens are busy. Their parents are busy. My parents and brother are busy. My friends are busy. Everyone is busy.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, we were created to do work. Ephesians 2:10 says that "we are [God's] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them." Even when God created Adam (before the fall of the human race into sin, mind you), He "put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it" (Gen. 2:15). Working is one of our purposes in life.
Even so, just like anything else, work can become meaningless and detrimental to our fellowship with Christ if we separate it from Him. It can even become an idol. This can happen in several different ways, but there is one in particular that God brought to my attention.
This morning, I was reading in the third chapter of Exodus (nope, not Luke 10! Although, the story of Mary and Martha is another one that God often uses to work on me in this area). I've read this chapter many times before, but something caught my attention in a new way as I sat curled up with my Bible in our cozy little nook. Feeling familiar with the passage, I read the following words quickly:
"Now Moses was pasturing the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian; and he led the flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. The angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. So Moses said, 'I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.' When the LORD saw that he turned aside to look..." (Ex. 3:1-4a).
And I came to a screeching halt.
What if Moses hadn't turned aside to look? I mean, I know it was a burning bush that wasn't being consumed and all, but still. What if? After all, he was working and going about his day just like any other day. What if he had been so focused on the task at hand that he had somehow missed the burning bush altogether? What if he had seen it and thought it was interesting, but decided that he just didn't have the time to stop and take a closer look? What if he just wrote it off as some trick that his mind was playing on him or some coincidence?
But he did stop.
"When the LORD saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, 'Moses, Moses!' And he said, 'Here I am.' Then He said, 'Do not come near hear; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.' He said also, 'I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God" (Ex. 3:4-6).
From here, Moses went on, along with Aaron, to be used of God to deliver the nation of Israel from the brutal, oppressive slavery of the Egyptians. As they say, the rest is history.
As I've thought about this passage today, God has been impressing upon my heart to:
(1) make sure that the work I am doing is the work He has called me to do. I know even good work (e.g., ministries) can be worthless if it is not the work that He has designated for me to do. I don't want to settle for what is good and miss out on what is best.
(2) make sure that I am not cruising through life so quickly and thoughtlessly that I miss His presence.
(3) make sure that I don't live with my eyes to the ground or so fixated on the work I want to do that I am blind to the ways God is showing Himself and working all around me.
(4) make sure that I am in tune to the Holy Spirit and that I respond to Him when I recognize His gentle, quiet prompting. I grieve over the opportunities that I have missed the times when I have quenched Him.
God's timing is so perfect. Lately, God has been rooting me in the fact that my work, first and foremost, is to be His witness: to make disciples who make disciples by sharing His Gospel message with those who don't know Him, by teaching His Word to those who do know Him, and by living a life that is evidence of the great gift that I have been given in Jesus Christ. My husband and I took the youth group to a conference called Dare 2 Share recently, and I was greatly challenged to be an example in the area of evangelism to our youth. In a couple days, we will also be participating in an Easter outreach to the community by taking cookies, homemade breads, and fliers for Easter Sunday to several families in our town in the hopes of building relationships and creating opportunities for Gospel conversations and encouraging prayer times. Our pastor has been putting a huge emphasis on outreach and evangelism in his sermons, and my husband and I just started going through a devotional book together that is also centered on the Gospel and on outreach. It is all very exciting and challenging.
Yet, I need to always remember the One whom all this is about and never get so wrapped up in it all that God Himself fades into the background. It seems absurd that such a thing could even happen, but I know that it is a real danger. I can do nothing worthwhile without His calling, His enabling, and His protection from the evil one. I can do nothing if I am not abiding in Christ.
So, yes, I will be busy. I will do the works God created me to do, but I will not let those works become an idol. By God's grace, I will worship and adore Him alone and have fellowship with Him in the quietness and in the busyness. By God's grace, I will do the works He created me to do in His strength and without losing sight of the One who is really doing the work. By God's grace, I will notice the burning bushes, and I too will turn aside to look.
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